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The great evolutionary changes of this epoch are in the mind. No, I don’t meant you’re imagining them. I mean they’re taking place in the extraordinary workings of the nerves and synapses of the brain.

It’s a little like growing up. Kids start out with no ability to reason. Gradually, they learn. They learn that hitting their friends to get what they want isn’t a good idea. They learn that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny aren’t real. They learn that everybody’s parents aren’t just like theirs.

Some kids take longer than others to learn. Some kids never do — they get stuck somewhere, for some reason, and never become wholly adults. You know the type. You’ve seen them at 40, angry at the world for not giving in to their every demand, blaming everyone but themselves for their ills.

They’ve never grown up, never evolved past that time in the distant past when their parents gave them everything because they were too small and helpless to fend for themselves. And now they see anything good and decent happening to and for other people as a direct affront to themselves, to their own deep-seeded feelings of inadequacy.

Society, humans — we grow up too, as a group. But since we’re made up of individual humans who are all at different levels of growing up, the group doesn’t mature all at once. The group has to wait for its individual members to push it to the next level. Kinda like how sometimes, when we’re younger, some parts of our bodies grow faster than others. Look at kittens, with their giant ears. They’ll “grow into them” the way a human child might have exceptionally large feet at 8 and “grow into the them” by 12.

We humans are “growing into” a new (for many), more cooperative and compassionate way of looking at the world. We’re evolving, becoming more human.

The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer says firefighters in Tennessee, who stood by and watched a house burn to the ground because the homeowner hadn’t paid a $75 fee, did the “right thing,” the “Christian thing.” If that’s the Christian thing, or even the right thing (which it most definitely isn’t), then I want no part of it. It’s not the human — the humane — thing to do.

Fischer says critics “have fallen prey to a weakened, feminized version of Christianity that is only about softer virtues such as compassion and not in any part about the muscular Christian virtues of individual responsibility and accountability.”

Really? I say the firefighters who just stood there — and the fire chief who ordered them to — have fallen prey to a cynical, inhumane version of humanity that is only about having no virtues at all and not in any part about the very human virtues of compassion and a desire to help out your fellow man (and woman).

Those firefighters, and their chief, are still children. Their decisions weren’t about “individual responsibility and accountability.” They were about screwing the guy who didn’t play by the rules they set up. And that takes us to whoever it was who devised this system. Those guys are nothing but playground bullies. They turned their backs on Gene Cranick when he said he’d pay them anything if they’d save his house.

The firefighters responded to the call in case the fire spread to any neighbors who did pay the fee, which it did, and that fire they doused. That guy had given them his lunch money, bought into the protection racket the other children of Obion County put in place.

The right thing? In whose world? Oh, right. The conservatives’ world. The one where everything should be privatized because wealthy businesspeople know best how to run the world. And if you don’t agree, well, you’ll lose everything you own when your house burns down.

Kinda like not voting for an extension of unemployment benefits in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

More evolved people would never have set up such a system. They know that society functions best when its individual members band together. In smaller groups, order can be easily maintained with consensus decision-making. But as the group gets larger, some kind of governing structure needs to be in place.

The founders of the United States put in place a pretty good system. Sure, it’s flawed, as were the founders — although they were the most evolved people of their day. But now the less evolved have grown up enough to learn how to circumvent the protections put in place by those men. They’ve learned how to convince other unevolved people of the “wisdom” of their ideas, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

We, on the other hand, can’t stoop that low. We just can’t. Once upon a time, we could. Once upon a time, the left had no problems lying or instigating violence to get what it wanted. But we’ve grown up since then. We can’t do that anymore, because it’s wrong. Just like standing by while some poor schlump’s house burns down.

It’s evolution, plain and simple. Cro-magnon man won the race with neanderthal man. Progressives will win the race with regressives. But there’s no reasoning with them — they lack the ability to reason. They can’t see what we can see, just like somewhere out there are people who see far more than we can, who have evolved beyond our comprehension.

It’s a small world for the unevolved. Every indication of change is a threat. They band together tighter and tighter while we expand our horizons and look beyond the immediate. They look to myths and legends to answer questions we know have answers in science and knowledge.

Humans have progressed and still are progressing, always will. But every human society must contend with those too fearful to go forward, those who would much rather go to back to times they think would be easier — when answers came from some higher place and humanity didn’t have to think for itself or look beyond immediate families or tribes for protections. Because other families, other tribes, were too threatening.

We don’t live there anymore, and we’ll never go back, no matter how hard they try. They can only make things harder for themselves — and for us.

No wonder they don’t believe in evolution. It’s the one constant thing, the one thing they can’t bear to contemplate.